On Tuesday the 1st June 2004 PKI in Rotherham, the Whirlpool Service Partner for the Sheffield area entered into voluntary liquidation bringing the total of failed or dropping out partners up to the total of three, for 2004 alone!
Rumours are rife of problems with other partners as well, with money being cited as the major issue yet again and, I am led to believe, the primary reason for PKI stepping down and then being forced to enter into voluntary liquidation. Basically, as far as I can gather, this is almost solely down to Whirlpool being accused of being unprepared to pay the partners the proper rate for the job they want done.
PKI’s former area is (I believe) to be handled mostly by Eastern Domestics based in Peterborough some 2 hours driving time away from Rotherham and Sheffield. Huby Domestics have also been appointed to carry out service in some areas for Whirlpool in the North of England.
With the current rising fuel costs the partners, who are trading on extremely low margins if any at all, are bound to be squeezed still further and some may struggle to survive. But given some of the rumours circulating at the moment they may not survive irrespective of the fuel costs. As the speculation is that Whirlpool have been forced to support approximately 75% of its service partners just to keep them in business in some way or another and yet, despite this, partner’s businesses are still failing. You would be tempted to ask why this is, apparently Whirlpool do not and have not resolved many of the problems reported in previous articles.
I emailed Whirlpool’s European Press Office some weeks ago for their comments on this and the tumble dryer that allegedly went on fire as reported on BBC’s Watchdog program and discussed in the forums, I have received no response whatsoever.
On Tuesday, since the Whirlpool UK/EU site was down I emailed Steve J Duthie at the Whirlpool global press office in the US, again not even the courtesy of a reply. Pretty bad public relations I feel for a company of Whirlpool’s stature that they cannot even, it would seem, be bothered to reply to a simple legitimate enquiry.
Cooking The Books!
However, despite all the above the saga rumbles on with Whirlpool attempting to get its partners first time completion rates up, the problem is that by going about it the way they are they are effectively forcing the partners to cook the books. I have seen the first time completion figures and it is amazing how partners can jump from a mediocre performance to a stunning one in a month or two, rising from less than 70% first time hit rate to 80%+ in such a short space of time. Until of course you realise that all that is happening is that the partners are producing the figures that Whirlpool and its customers wish to see, whether or not they are accurate seems irrelevant so long as the KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) are met. But the key word there is “indicator”, that is not to say it is a fact.
Of course the big problem with falsifying the first time hit rate is that it is absolutely paramount to determining whether a contract is profitable or not and jumps such as the one illustrated above create a totally false indication of the viability of the contract. It looks great at management meetings for those that can justify their existence with figures like this, but sadly doesn’t help the agents pay the wages or bills!
It also will lull customers and clients into a false sense of security, painting a picture of a service network that is totally false in terms of performance. Not only that it will lead to Whirlpool not understanding why there is a problem, the issues obscured by its own internal politics and number crunching.
Given the figures I was shown and coupling it with the rates that were released some months ago there looks to be further troubled times ahead for Whirlpool’s UK service network and more partners may well fall by the wayside, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens and of course keep you posted.
Of course the content of this article is personal opinion and speculation based on the information given
